The Lusty Years

When "Diamond Jim" Brady was the towering pinnacle of vulgar glitter . . and Lillian Russell heaved her eternal voluptuousness against the hungry jackal gleam in the tired businessman's eye . . . art in America . . . was merely an adjunct of plush and cut glass . . . Its heart pumped only anemia.

Thus Painter Everett Shinn summed up the turn-of-the-century standards: idealized nudes wrapped in cheesecloth, banal studio models posed in quaint period costumes. Into this world rushed a group of artists who, by the genteel standards of the day, behaved like sandlot hoodlums bent on showing only America's dirty face. Their talented and dashing leader was Robert Henri, goad and teacher to more than a dozen leading American painters. Last week, with the biggest collection of Henri's work to be shown since 1931 on display at New Jersey's Montclair Art Museum, tribute was rendered to Henri and the days when American art came of age.

After Welsh Rarebit. Born in Cincinnati in 1865, the son of a wild West faro player, Robert Henri (belligerently pronounced Hen-rye) got his early training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, followed it with eleven years, on and off, of traveling in France, Italy and Spain. Back in Philadelphia in the '90s, Henri was ready for his first circle of converts, a group of Philadelphia newspaper illustrators who made Henri's studio their rendezvous. There, between amateur theatricals, impromptu concerts and Welsh-rarebit feasts, Henri preached a two-fisted approach to painting, drove home his lessons with references to the exciting "modern" works of Courbet and Manet--plus such old masters as Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Goya and Velasquez. Soon his eager listeners, including such star pupils as William Glackens, Everett Shinn. George Luks and John Sloan, were spending their off hours carrying out Henri's advice: "Forget about art and paint pictures of what interests you in life."

As Henri's pupils moved to New York, Henri followed them. Setting up his own school in upper Broadway's Lincoln Arcade, Henri attracted young art students in droves. Henri's school was unquestionably the liveliest art center in New York. Scoffing at "art for art's sake," Henri urged his students to plunge into life, read Whitman and Dostoevsky, go to see Isadora Duncan dance. Students like Guy Pene du Bois and Edward Hopper became Henri enthusiasts. So did Rockwell Kent. Assigned to paint Central Park, Kent is said to have spent the night sleeping on a park bench to get in the right mood. Young George Bellows took to haunting Sharkey's Athletic Club across the street, and was soon turning out prizefighting scenes that set shocked New York critics back on their heels. John Sloan roamed downtown Manhattan's streets and bars, finding there the storytelling incidents that made him the Big City's first big painter.

Up with the Ash Can. With its defiant 1908 show, staged in protest against the academic National Academy of Design, Henri's "Ash Can School"* blew the lid off New York's art world. Critics were horrified, but Manhattanites turned up at the rate of 300 an hour to see paintings of such "unartistic" subjects as dance halls and crowded city streets.

Though the group never showed together again, their revolt made history. It led to Manhattan's first independent show (no jury, no prizes) and paved the way for the 1913 Armory show, a landmark event that first gave the U.S. public the full impact of Europe's postimpressionist, fauve and cubist painters (sensation of the show: Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase).

Down with the Mickey Finn. Ironically, the Armory show also marked the end of Henri's overwhelming influence (although he lived until 1929). As a portraitist, Henri strove to catch "the living instant," and he often said his goal was "to paint the greatest portrait in the world in 30 minutes." His robust bravura can still hold the spectator's eye. But today Henri's surface effects seem thin and superficial, less revolutionary than mannered Manet.

What Henri did was to galvanize a host of painters into facing their native material in their own way, thus giving to realism a fresh meaning and vitality. "Without Henri's and Sloan's prompt and relentless efforts," said one of Henri's former students, "art in America would have imbibed its 'Mickey Finn' of complacency, slept on, hobbled on, sinking lower and lower . . . sugary and perfumed with the heavy odor of preservatives."

* Henri, Sloan, Shinn, Luks, Glackens, Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast and Arthur Davies.

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